Every day of the year, according to Chinese government figures, “mass incidents” occur all over the country, usually involving some sort of confrontation between the authorities and ordinary citizens. Although there is considerable debate about what exactly constitutes a “mass incident,” even senior government officials concede that …

Uber-chef/restauranteur Daniel Boulud is in town to oversee the soft-ish opening of his Maison Boulud restaurant in the restored former U.S. Legation (see here for a previous post about this pretty amazing project). While interviewing the amiable (particularly for a chef: no Gordon Ramsay he, though I haven’t worked in his kitchen) Chef …






 Tell me again what it was holding the Olympics in Beijing was supposed to accomplish? A bit of political reform in China? A touch of liberalization? With the whole world watching during the run up, China would show its best face, not its nastier side? Wasn’t that the riff from both Beijing and the IOC?
Never …

I am just back from a trip to the United States. I usually try to do all I can to avoid getting inside the domestic airline system there and more or less succeeded this time, taking trains up and down the east coast. I have spent a great deal of time flying within two large nations in the last decade, China and Indonesia and, in terms of …

Are you a John Woo fan? Now’s your chance to ask him anything you want. Legendary film director Woo is known for Hong Kong action classics such as The Killer and A Better Tomorrow, as well as Hollywood blockbusters Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II. His latest film, Red Cliff, is the most expensive movie ever made in Asia. Click here …

The theme of TIME’s Summer Journey issue this year is sports and games, and there are some China-related stories worth checking out. Hannah Beech writes about China’s sports schools, Bill Powell looks at street basketball and Hugh Porter examines the country’s fascination with snooker.

In last week’s issue of TIME Asia guest writer Jiajia Liu, who was born in China and now lives in London, wrote about her feelings of pride for her homeland.

I left China in 1989, just after Tiananmen, when I was 7. My mother and I traveled to London to join my father, a Ph.D. student sponsored by the Chinese government. I grew up in

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One of the big questions emerging out of Beijing’s decision to hike fuel prices last week is what effect it will have on inflation in China. Inflation has been a consistent headache for Chinese authorities over the last year. The rising price of food, particularly pork, has been the biggest contributor to rises in the consumer price …

The Beijing government has announced its plans for car restrictions during the Olympics. These are one of the key measures to prevent the Games from being clouded by a toxic air. It’s been understood for a while that some sort of limitations would be placed on vehicle traffic in Beijing. What’s surprising is how early the measures will …

From the Oil Drum (via Foreign Policy’s Passport blog) comes an eye-popping graph on a most mundane subject: cement. As someone who complained earlier this week about the work going on just outside my bedroom, these figures shouldn’t be a surprise. And still. This is what happens when you take that seven-day-a-week construction and …

Monday’s overseas edition of the People’s Daily has an essay about the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. As Ed Cody notes in the Washington Post, it focuses heavily and rather awkwardly on the issue of race. The overall argument of the People’s Daily piece is that Obama’s candidacy isn’t truly a step forward for equality. Here’s a …

Little is permanent in Beijing these days, but the construction work outside my house shows little sign of ever ending. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my neighborhood is in a frenzy preparing for the Games. Homes are being torn down and rebuilt, walls bricked over or painted, roofs and windows replaced. When this started there was …

A friend involved in Tibet issues writes to say that the latest in a constant stream of attacks on his email purportedly came from me. or at least my feminine side. He says he gets many of these kind of emails, which invariably ask him to open an attachment that almost certainly contains a type of virus called a Trojan horse that can …